A few weeks ago I participated in the Idle Thumbs community’s bi-annual game jam. I talked about what it was last year in a post I made for Shoot That Pizza, so I won’t go into it in huge detail. Anyway, this time around I organised it, which was really fun! We got over 45 entries in total, and the games that were submitted were really excellent. I’m really happy with the way everything turned out.

For my jam entry, I made a game called Explode Mode. It’s a game about driving a hover tank with a wacky and novel control mechanic. It’s inspired by Katamari Damacy, but it’s a twin stick shooter?! That sounds confusing but it’s fun, I promise. You can download it for free right here:

UPDATE 1:

The hosts of Idle Thumbs played my game on their Twitch stream! I think they enjoyed it?!

I have another event appearance coming up! I’ll be showing Button Frenzy at Multiplay’s Insomnia57 later this month, from the 25th – 28th of March at the NEC, Birmingham. That’s just a few days before Gadget Show Live and in the same venue, so I guess I’ll be pretty familiar with that place by the end of the week.

My friends and I had a game jam last weekend and made a game about tuning old analog TVs. It’s called TV Trouble, and it turned out really well! It’s up on itch.io right now, so you can check it out here:

It’s a fast-paced arcade game, that plays like a really frantic version of Simon Says. The footage you see in the gif above and the trailer below is from the jam build of the game, which took me 2 weeks to build. I’m pretty pleased with how well it turned out! I’ve been doing a lot of game jams lately, and it’s really satisfying to see the ways in which each new project is an improvement over the others. I might go into that in more detail later, but today I have something important to share:

Button Frenzy is on Steam Greenlight right now! I’m planning to expand upon the jam game and put out a full version on Steam, and Greenlight is one of the steps you currently have to go through (if you’re tiny and self-published as I am). If you’re reading this and you have a Steam account, it would hugely help me out if you paid a visit to the Greenlight page and voted for it. Every vote helps, so if you like the look of the game, please do vote!

I had been meaning to get around to this for some time, but I never got around to it until now. I wanted something semi-nice looking to use as an ident for future trailer videos (more info on that soon), so I put together something quick in After Effects. Here it is:

It’s been a while since I made an update here. My friends and I made some games recently as part of a recurring game jam we do under the name of SUPERCORE. I really enjoy game jams as a way of learning new stuff and branching out from my comfort zone without the pressure of having to make something that is “successful”, or the worry that the game will take ages to finish. Anyway, here’s what we made:

I finally got around to figuring out how to use the in-editor screen capture tool, so I can record 60 FPS video now. Here’s a few gifs of what the game looks like at the moment. Now that I’m able to, I’ll be posting more of these in the future.